Mark Sisson's Blog, page 376

Are We Pre-Programmed to Be Happy?

I think we can all agree that a basic goal in life is the attainment of happiness, that mind state characterized by positive and pleasant thoughts and emotions. But how do we become happy? By definition, happiness requires some type of pleasure to be present. We need good feelings and good physical sensations. Furthermore, the pleasure must come first, before the happiness. Something, and I don’t care what it is, has to make you feel good before you can truly call yourself happy. As such, our behaviors and our motivations are shaped by that pleasure-seeking tendency. And that pleasure-seeking is mediated through the reward system, which has several different but interrelated components: liking, which describes the sensation of pleasure; wanting, which describes the desire to obtain the thing; and learning, the Pavlovian-esque conditioning. Basically, if we do something or expose ourselves to something (a fun social situation, a healthy food, the sun) that confers a survival and/or health benefit (improved social standing, some vital nutrient that our body needs, vitamin D production), our reward center “activates.” We like it, we want it, and we learn that having it is in our best interest.

Today, I’m interested in the “liking” part of reward – both the subjective experience of pleasure (“that hand massage feels good”) and the objective hedonic response (the neurochemistry that controls the hand massage feeling good). Ultimately, it’s the “liking” that we, well, like. It’s the sensation of pleasure we experience before anything else. We have to know that something feels good before we can want it, before a behavior can be reinforced or learned.

We like things for a reason that extends beyond the “liking.” There’s a biochemical component to pleasure, couched in the evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce and prosper. Thus, if hitting a squat PR, having great sex with your partner, and eating the bag of fat and protein and collagen known as a grass-fed beef rib make you feel warm and tingly, that’s probably a sign that those things are good for you, because our pleasure system was likely developed with those stimuli (lifting heavy things, sexual contact, animal fat and protein) in mind. Conversely, a gram of cocaine on a Saturday night, a hard drive full of every porn permutation imaginable, and a McRib might make you feel even warmer and tinglier, and they’ll certainly keep you coming back for more, but they are supraphysiological triggers of those same reward pathways and thus deserving of suspicion. Our reward systems likely weren’t developed to handle stimuli of that magnitude, because stimuli of that magnitude simply did not exist. Our reward systems developed for a reason: to reinforce behaviors that conferred a survival benefit.

How does it all work?

As neuroscientists are learning new things about the brain’s pleasure systems every day, it’s still a work in progress, but this is the basic gist:

Sensory data from touch, smell, taste, and sound travel to the sensory cortex, where they are interpreted in terms of magnitude. Was it a soft or a hard touch, a strong or a faint smell, a powerful or a mild flavor – that sort of thing. Strong sensations elicit lots of sensory cortex activity as seen in MRIs, while sensations of less magnitude elicit less activity. From the sensory cortex, the data is sent to various parts of the brain, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and a host of others. These are the “hedonic hotspots,” areas of the brain rich in opioid-and-cannabinoid-producing and opioid-and-cannabinoid-receptive neurons (PDF). The more a person reports liking a particular sensation, the greater these areas light up with activity when presented with data from said sensation. The OFC, it seems, is a hotspot where a lot of the initial liking happens. The ventral pallidum is another, perhaps the major, hedonic hotspot that has been shown to respond to “diverse human rewards from food to money.” (PDF) The VP receives data from a host of other brain reward areas, including the OFC, to which it applies “liking.” It is in this particularly hedonic hotspot that researchers think opioids and endocannabinoids effectively “paint” sensations with “hedonic gloss” to make them pleasurable to us. “Sweet” isn’t delicious if the hedonic hotspots don’t get their say in the matter.

Pleasure is also mediated and modified by context. Hunger is the best spice, after all, and there’s nothing quite so pleasurable as an ice cold glass of water when you’re parched on a summer’s day. If a sodium-replete rat is given a super-salty food to taste, there is no pleasure response in the brain. If a sodium-depleted rat is given the same super-salty food, it’s suddenly pleasurable (PDF). Thus, it’s not just the properties of the stimulus that determine the pleasure response, but also the physiological needs of the person responding.

What about dopamine?

Although it used to be viewed as the pleasure neurotransmitter, neuroscientists generally agree that dopamine is the driver of reward. It’s the neurotransmitter that creates “wanting,” not “liking.” Dopamine does not mediate sensory pleasure. Dopamine doesn’t make sex feel good. It just makes you want the sex. Or, with something like amphetamine, which increases dopamine, you “want” the drug even if you don’t “like” the feeling.

Now that we have a rudimentary understanding of how pleasure works in the brain, let’s look at some specific examples of how this neurochemistry plays out when we’re exposed to a pleasurable stimulus.

Eating

Food is perhaps the most fundamental trigger of pleasure circuits (and the most easily abused). Stephan from Whole Health Source and J. Stanton from Gnolls.org both have excellent takes on the food-reward system that pretty much cover it all. Go read them.

Sex

I probably don’t have to tell anyone this, but orgasm feels good. It’s an overpowering pleasure, an intense culmination that somehow marries anticipation with sensation. Sure enough, during male ejaculation, the (male’s) brain apparently lights up like a heroin user’s right after shooting up, indicating a major role for opioids. Neuroimaging studies on women during orgasm also reveal significant activation of the brain’s pleasure centers. I also don’t have to tell anyone why sex feeling good helps the survival of the species, nor why our brains would insist on making sex pleasurable.

Exercise

You’ve all heard about the runner’s high, right, that euphoric, pleasant state of mind you can reach through intense exercise? It used to be assumed that elevated serum levels of beta-endorphins (an endogenous opioid) were responsible, until scientists realized that beta-endorphins are too large to cross the blood-brain barrier into the brain, where the “pleasant state of mind” generally resides. In order for endorphins to be responsible, it would have to be the endorphins that the brain itself secretes. Only problem? Doing a spinal tap to check the opioid content of brain fluid is highly unpleasant and not very practical for human subjects. Luckily, a team of German scientists figured out a non-invasive way to track the activity of endorphins in the brain. They used this method on runners who’d just completed an intense bout of endurance training and found that endorphins do increase in the brain after exercise, particularly in the runners who reported the most euphoria. These brain endorphins aren’t just there to make you feel good, either. They’re also necessary for the exercise-induced creation of new brain cells. Furthermore, it appears that voluntary exercise is key. Plodding on the treadmill with the trainer’s proverbial whip at your back might not have quite the same pleasurable (and brain-boosting) effect as going for a trail run through your favorite piece of wilderness.

Endocannabinoids play a role, too. They’re small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, and mice with a cannabinoid receptor deficiency in the brain run 30-40% less than control mice. In humans and dogs, exercise increases anandamide (an endocannabinoid) signaling throughout the body and brain. They say we’re “wired to run,” but really, we’re “wired to do things that make us happy.”

Touch

Touch is both utilitarian and pleasing. You use it to grasp the handle of the shovel, to tell you that you’ve just bumped into something, to differentiate between sharp and dull objects, and to shake hands, among other activities. But touch can also be sensual and pleasurable, and research shows the large myelinated nerve fibers that pick up on “rapid skin movement” (hard labor, grasping door handles, shaking hands, utilitarian stuff) are separate from the nerve fibers that pick up on “innocuous skin deformation” (stroking, caressing). In fact, the sensual fibers, known as c-tactile nerve fibers, activate the orbitofrontal cortex, the same place that responds to pleasant tastes and smells, as well as other areas of the brain known to be activated by opioids. The large myelinated fibers activate and inform the tactile discrimination function (the ability to differentiate sensory data received through touch), which is mediated through another area of the brain.

Touch also releases oxytocin, a hormone that helps lower stress, increase relaxation, and promote bonding. Oxytocin probably isn’t directly related to hedonic pleasure, but the attenuation of stress and the feeling of bonding with another person are a kind of pleasure – and certainly improve one’s survival fitness.

Sun Exposure

Lying in the sun, particularly when you haven’t seen any for awhile, is an intensely pleasurable experience. You’re warm, you’re relaxed, you can almost feel the vitamin D synthesizing. For all intents and purposes, reasonable sun exposure is a healthy endeavor the pursuit of which should be mediated by the brain’s reward system. And yet study after study indicate that sun exposure does not increase circulating serum opioids. What’s the deal here? Well, seeing as how opioids in the blood can’t really cross into the brain, all these studies tell us very little about what’s going on in the brain and thus triggering (or not) our pleasure centers. I was unable to find any studies that looked at brain opioid activity, but seeing as how the addictive nature of tanning is being seriously explored, and getting sun is subjectively pleasurable, I’m confident it too triggers the pleasure network in the brain.

After all, even when you try to fool experienced tanners with fake UV, they know the difference and prefer real UV. Something is making the sun rewarding. If I had to place a wager, I’d bet that it has to do with the proopiomelanocortin (POMC) gene, whose expression triggers the secretion of melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH, a hormone that darkens the skin and protects it from UV damage) in the pituitary and beta-endorphins in the brain. If sunlight can trigger the release of MSH via the POMC gene, perhaps it’s also releasing beta-endorphins in the brain to make you feel good and get more sun (and thus vitamin D). This hasn’t been explicitly tested, but it wouldn’t be a surprising result.

Sound

Studies indicate that opioid action in the brain precipitates the “chills” or “shivers down the spine” you get when listening to a particularly good song. Indeed, as the intensity of the chills increased, cerebral blood flow to the areas of the brain involved with reward and pleasure also increased. Wait, wait, wait – but music isn’t “natural.” Why do we respond so strongly to it? Well, music takes advantage of pleasure centers that evolved to respond to the babbling brook that promises fresh water, the cry of gulls that means the coast is near, the crashing waves that accompany the gathering of shellfish. You generally don’t get chills from listening to the sound of nature, but rather a warm, relaxed, soothing feeling. Those pleasant feelings are happening in the same brain that produces music-induced chills, probably through similar avenues.

You’ve probably noticed that the neurochemistry of all this pleasure stuff isn’t quite as ironclad as, say, the Kreb’s cycle. We can recreate the latter on a poster using arrows and legends and symbols and know that it’s an accurate representation of what’s going on in your body. We can’t yet make a neat picture of what happens in the brain to make sensations pleasurable, because the brain is plastic and the pleasure “center” is actually spread out over many different regions. It’s not a linear path. Heck, the guys who study this stuff for a living admit that many questions remain unanswered. However, what we do know is this: the actual physical manifestions of happiness and pleasure are not learned, but innate.

Or, as Kent Berridge (PDF), neuroscientist of pleasure (sounds like a great male stripper name, eh?), puts it, “Evidence so far available suggests that brain mechanisms involved in fundamental pleasures (food and sexual pleasures) overlap with those for higher-order pleasures (e.g. monetary, artistic, musical, altruistic and transcendent pleasures). From sensory pleasures and drugs of abuse to monetary, aesthetic and musical delights, all pleasures seem to involve the same hedonic brain systems, even when linked to anticipation and memory.”

In other words, we come equipped with a robust and complex reward and pleasure system(s) whose primary job is to keep us healthy, strong, fit, and above all, happy. Sure, as I mentioned last week, those systems can be hijacked by processed food, drugs, alcohol, tanning beds, and other hyper-stimuli to wreak havoc on our health and happiness, but the systems are not our enemies. If we use our better judgment, if we stop to think about why whatever we’re doing feels good and makes us happy, if we trust our intuition that things like bird songs, sunshine, the smell of dirt, and a babbling brook are good stimuli, I think we can actually use the reward/pleasure system for its intended purpose – to guide us toward smart choices that benefit our health, happiness and wellness.

Sorry, for the length on this one, folks, but the subject matter itself is a little dense. I hope you enjoyed it. Most importantly, I hope you learned a little something about why you like the things that you like, and why liking them isn’t just understandable, but absolutely necessary for health and happiness.

I’ll be covering how we can align our lifestyle behaviors with what our genes “expect” of us to live not only healthy and fit lives, but also happy, fulfilling, content and peaceful existences in the modern world, here on Mark’s Daily Apple and in my upcoming book The Primal Connection (due out first quarter 2013). Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Grab a Copy of The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation and Start Getting Primal Today!

The Power of Daydreaming: Why You Should Let Your Mind Wander

There’s something about these middle weeks of summer that feel less hurried, less brimming, more casual. At a certain point of the season, everybody remembers to relax a little and soak it in. The “lazy days” mood got me thinking about daydreaming – those lost minutes (maybe hours) in which we unintentionally slip into contemplation. Sometimes we end up floating into more serious ruminations. Other times, it’s just loose and happy reverie. We all do it – whether it’s looking out the window of our morning train, laying in the backyard hammock, or sitting (standing, rather!) at our work desk. It can often happen even if we’re trying to focus. Call it a lapse in discipline, but the brain seems to have its own agenda in those moments. Is there some purpose here beyond mere escapism? What is the brain really up to, and what could daydreaming have to do with well-being?

Grant me a little musing of my own. When I was young I went to the woods to explore, tear around, and ultimately end up daydreaming on a tall rock or tree branch. Summer was the perfect time for this, of course. I was free to make the whole day. Boredom was the catalyst for many an imagined contraption or random life realization. It makes me wonder how much time the over-scheduled child has for daydreaming these days in his/her summer. We adults, too, suffer in an existence characterized by constant bombardments of input. Daydreaming, however endangered, is still at least encouraged within childhood. But we adults are supposed to be above such nonsensical bouts of inefficiency. I’d call it another blow to those things deemed “optional” that are actually essential for living a good life.

According to one recent research survey, we underappreciate the impact of introspection and daydreaming on our cognitive life and individual wellness. Open-ended reflection, Dr. Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California notes, is critical to our development of personal reasoning and socioemotional well-being. It can help us synthesize learning and experience – to make memory and meaning of them in our lives. Sometimes, however, reflection can favor fantasy to blunt an emotional impact when we’re simply frustrated by or deeply disturbed by the circumstances of our day. Daydreaming can be as protective as it can be productive.

Studies demonstrate the neurological profile of a wandering mind as much more dynamic than simply a default setting. Sure, daydreaming can be restful, but it’s more than mental idling. Scans of study participants reveal the daydreaming brain is operating with both the default functioning seen in routine tasks and the highly intricate “executive network” accessed for complex problem-solving. Perhaps most surprising, the less conscious participants were of their mental wandering, the more “activated” the executive network was.

Research has shown we spend roughly a third to a half of our waking hours in the clouds so to speak. Some of us journey further out and more frequently than others, and it may be related to our cognitive dispositions. According to research, people who tend to daydream demonstrate more creativity in study measures. Nonetheless, the practice accesses subterranean potential in all of us. In one research study, subjects allowed to daydream outperformed other groups in a creativity focused test by more than 40%. Some mental wanderings are undoubtedly more fruitful than others, but overall it’s the process more than the product that seems to matter.

I’d argue here of course that daydreaming is an essential dimension of play. In daydreaming, we’re free to psychologically traverse through every obscure or far flung thought. We’re welcome to try on any solution or scenario that piques our interest at the moment. However, emotional or practical, daydreaming hones our emotional and cognitive dexterity. We take apart a problem and perceive it from an entirely new angle. We reflect on an overriding emotion, pose ourselves in a novel role, and suddenly process it on some unique level. Who hasn’t indulged in a little Walter Mitty style fantasy and not felt better – or at least been pleasantly amused – for it? Isn’t it how we become more fully ourselves?

More seriously, it’s also partly how our species has become more deftly human. Some of humanity’s greatest inventions, most beautiful creations, and profound thoughts have stemmed from a bald-faced lack of intention. Anyone who’s had a eureka moment while daydreaming in the shower can attest to this phenomenon. Far from some shiftless indulgence, daydreaming is part of our species’ cerebral jackpot. There was perhaps more to adaptive advantage than conscious strategizing. Daydreaming, with its unique neurological profile, opens up the chance for random connection, irrelevant association, and novel insight. At some point along the evolutionary line, these were the game changers.

When you daydream, the fact is, you’re exercising your mental muscle. You’re honing your critical and creative thinking. You’re sowing the seed of self-development. You’re owning your evolutionarily bestowed cerebral potential – and its privilege. Maybe, along the way, you’re finding a meaningful resolution to a pragmatic challenge or just turning over an existential question. Put away the techno gadgets and other “pellet” distractions. See what comes out of free, spontaneous thinking. The exercise is more Primal than you think.

Here’s a casual suggestion for the day: Embrace the leisure of summer and make some time for losing yourself in thought. Drop everything and do it now, or schedule it if you have to. Don’t go to bed tonight without endeavoring some kind of cerebral journey. Your brain – and perhaps your well-being – will be the better for it.

Enjoy the rest of your week, everyone. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks for stopping by today.

Grab a Copy of  The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation  and Start Getting Primal Today!

Is it Primal? – Sunflower Oil, Wheat Germ, Skyr, and Other Foods Scrutinized

It’s time for another edition of “Is It Primal?”, where I do my best to rescue certain foods from Primal limbo (if they deserve it) and banish others to Primal exile. And sometimes, I’ll keep a food languishing just because there’s really nowhere else to put it. This week I have five foods. Some, like sunflower oil and wheat germ, are quite common. There’s a good chance you have, or soon will, encounter them out there in the wild, and I hope to give you the tools to handle them. Other foods, like skyr and corn smut, won’t be quite so common (unless you’re a time traveler from 16th century Mesoamerica or an Icelander), but you never know when you’ll have the opportunity to eat some corn fungus and acidified cultured cheese yogurt. You want to be prepared. The last food isn’t really a food, but rather a supplement that attempts to replace a food.

Let’s go.

Sunflower Oil

Sunflower oil a seed oil made from, you guessed it, sunflower seeds. Since we tend to avoid the seed oils (or at least limit them as much we can), it seems like sunflower oil is a definite “no.” But wait – why exactly do we shy away from seed oils?

The omega-6 content – We already get plenty of omega-6 fats in our diets, especially since the physiological requirements for these technically essential fatty acids are so incredibly low. Eat some chicken, a couple egg yolks, maybe a handful of nuts every once in awhile, and you’ll get plenty of omega-6. Throw in some food sauteed in soybean oil, some mayo made with canola oil, and some store-bought salad dressing and you’re risking throwing off your healthy omega 3:6 ratio.

The rancidity - Seed oils are usually exposed to the three main agents of oxidation – heat, light, and air – either in the factory at conception, on the store shelves, or in the restaurants. Seeing as how most seed oils are very high in fragile polyunsaturated fats, exposing them to the three agents of oxidation tends to easily oxidize the fats. Oxidized omega-6 fats are better left uneaten.

However, not all sunflower oil is high in omega-6. Standard (high-linoleic) sunflower oil is indeed high in linoleic acid, an omega-6 fat, but high-oleic sunflower oil is at least 82% oleic acid, the same monounsaturated fat found in olive oil, lard, and your very own adipose tissue, while being extremely low in PUFAs (I’ve even seen a sunflower oil with just half a gram of omega-6 per tablespoon, comparable to macadamia oil). Monounsaturated fats are far more resistant to oxidation. They’re even producing high-stearic sunflower oil, which is high in both oleic and stearic acid (a saturated fat extremely resistant to oxidation). Although a good bottle of olive oil, a nice pat of grass-fed butter, or a tub of red palm oil are going to be better, more nutrient-dense sources, I don’t see much wrong with either high-oleic or high-stearic sunflower oil. They’re totally tasteless, which makes them a good oil for Primal mayo.

If you’re worried about GMOs, sunflowers have yet to be genetically-modified. The different versions are developed using good old-fashioned cross-breeding.

Verdict: Primal. Just be sure to go for cold-pressed (which preserves vitamin E and reduces oxidation), high-oleic/high-stearic sunflower oil.

Wheat Germ

In case you’re wondering why wheat germ is even worth considering, it’s the gluten. Or, more specifically, it’s the relative lack of gluten. See, the oft-cited reason for avoiding wheat and other grains like barley, rye, and spelt is the presence of gluten, a common allergen, promoter of inflammation, and all-around jerk. Since gluten is a protein residing mostly within the endosperm of a grain, and the germ, which is the largely protein-free (but not totally) part of a wheat grain that eventually germinates (hence, “germ”) and grows into a new plant, has very little gluten, some people were wondering whether incorporating wheat germ into the diet would be akin to using real soy sauce. That is, since there’s not much gluten, perhaps a fairly gluten-tolerant (as much as you can be) person can eat a little wheat germ now and then.

You certainly can, but I still wouldn’t. Wheat germ has a little something called wheat germ agglutinin, a particularly potent lectin that protects wheat from insects, yeasts, and bacteria. It also tries to protect wheat from other, larger predators, like hairless bipedal agrarian apes, by attacking and perforating the intestinal lining. There’s also evidence that WGA interacts with insulin receptors (PDF) in fat and liver cells, even going so far as to replicate the effects of insulin (like blunting the breakdown of fat within cells). Insulin plays an important physiological role in the shuttling of nutrients, but only when the presence of those nutrients trigger the insulin. Mimicking the effect of insulin with a foreign plant protein? Eh, I’m a little nervous about that. Luckily for most grain eaters, cooking, or at least boiling, deactivates most WGA (in bread, pasta, muffins, etc). But if you’re eating straight-up wheat germ, which folks usually use raw (because of enzymes, or something) in smoothies, oatmeal, or as a vegan ice cream topping, you’re getting a nice big unaffected dose of wheat germ agglutinin. I mean, it’s right there in the name: WHEAT GERM agglutinin.

Verdict: Not Primal.

Skyr

On December 19th of every year, Skyrgámur (or “Skyr Gobbler”) comes down from the mountains of Iceland to ransack homes for fifteen days in search of his precious, tangy, fermented, cultured skyr. Skyr, for those who don’t know, is a thickened cultured milk product, a sort of acidified cheese, similar in taste to Greek yogurt, only even thicker. As to why the Skyr Gobbler was so skyr-crazed, who knows? Perhaps this sort-of Santa Claus needs the probiotics to fight off his legendary IBS. Or maybe, seeing as how Iceland has a strong tradition of powerlifting, he’s doing a lactose-intolerant version of GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) in order to support his heavy squatting and deadlifting. Or it could be that Skyrgámur has forsaken his country’s powerlifting lineage and is secretly a practicing member of bodybuilding.com who needs a slow-digesting protein source right before bed. Since skyr has all the whey drained out, its casein content fits the bill. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that skyr exerts a strong pull on those who’ve known its pleasures. But is it Primal?

If you eat dairy, sure. If you can get your hands on it, yeah.

What’s interesting about skyr is that it’s a traditional dairy product that’s also low in fat. That is, modern low-fat versions of skyr aren’t bastardizing a sacred food; they’re actually continuing the tradition. Back in the day, milk (cow and sheep) was generally allowed to sit for a day, often on ice, to allow for separation of cream and skim. The skim (which wasn’t actually non-fat, but rather lower-fat) would run out the bottom of a bowl with a hole in it, leaving the cream to be turned into butter or used right away. Milk from a previous batch of skyr would inoculate the new milk, beginning the cycle anew.

Verdict: Primal (if you tolerate dairy).

Huitlacoche

“Corn smut.” It sounds dirty, like something from a genre of videos Iowa Big Agra lobbyists order on Pay Per View in DC hotel rooms when their employers pick up the tab, but it’s not like that at all. It’s actually a pathogenic fungus that afflicts corn crops, infecting the corn, threading its fungal fibers through every segment of the plant, and producing large unattractive tumors. Now, when I say “pathogenic,” I refer to the fact that it’s bad for the corn. It’s not actually bad for us. In fact, those tumors, also called galls, are actually delicious, nutritious amalgams of expanded enlarged kernels, fungal threads, and blue-black spores that taste a bit like earthy, woody mushrooms. The Aztecs (who coined the word “huitlacoche”) loved it so much that they’d purposely infect their maize crops with the fungus.

When you eat huitlacoche, you’re eating a mix of corn and fungus. The two have fused together to become a powerful functional food, as explained in one extensive paper (PDF) studying the nutritional qualities of corn smut. It’s got indolic compounds (also found in crucifers, thought to be protective against certain cancers like breast cancer due to their inhibitory effect on estrogen metabolism), polyphenols like anthocyanins (the same ones found in blueberries, gives the corn smut spore its blue-black appearance), and soluble fiber. It also increases the protein content and quality of the corn.

You’re not likely to go eat a big bowl of huitlacoche for breakfast. No, you’re more likely to happen across it while traveling, eating out at a traditional Mexican restaurant, or visiting a friend who’s cooking up some real Mexican food. In that case, I’d suggest you try it.

Verdict: Not exactly Primal, but interesting and seemingly nutritious enough that I wouldn’t sweat it too much.

Desiccated Liver Tabs

Desiccated liver tabs come up a lot in these discussions. For those of you who can’t, or won’t, eat real grass-fed liver – maybe you hate the taste, maybe you can’t find a good clean source, or maybe you just can’t find the time to prepare it – the prospect of a handy way to get your liver without having to eat it or cook it is appealing. Are they Primal?

For the most part, yes. They should give you the B-vitamins, iron, and vitamin A for which liver is so renowned. Most desiccated liver tabs are defatted, however, which means the fat and cholesterol are largely absent from the finished product. If you were eating fresh liver, the fat and cholesterol would be a plus, but in dried, desiccated foods, I’m wary of oxidized fat and cholesterol. Unfortunately, this probably means that liver tabs are missing much of the choline, which in liver is bound up in phosphatidylcholine, a phospholipid found in animal cells. So there’s a give and take.

A way around this (without eating fresh liver) would be to go for a freeze-dried liver pill, like this one. That way, you preserve the fat-soluble vitamins and nutrients without risking oxidation. Plus, the organs come from organic grass-fed New Zealand cattle.

Verdict: Primal.

That’s it for today, folks. Keep the questions coming, especially regarding questionable foods, and thanks for reading!

Grab a Copy of  The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation  and Start Getting Primal Today!

Dear Mark: Training Edition

I’m no stranger to spending the bulk of your time thinking about training, programming your training, planning your meals so that they support your training, modifying your training to affect your performance, and modifying your training to affect your body composition. I was an elite endurance athlete who dabbled extensively in strength training; I’ve been there. I’ve dug into the minutiae of it all. I’ve reveled in perfecting my post-workout and pre-workout nutrition. It’s fun, and a little addictive. And although I’m no longer concerned with that stuff for my own training, I know that many MDZ readers care about it, so I try to keep up with the current research. Today’s edition of Dear Mark is all about training. Let’s dig in.

Hey Mark,

My husband and I are looking into joining the National Guard, and I was wondering what’s the best way to go about prepping myself to handle the endurance running and high count push-ups and pull-ups (especially as a woman!), etc. that NG demands. Would it be worth our while to try to eat Primally during training?

Thanks,

chez Bliss

To get into the NG (as I’m sure you know), you have to satisfy the Army Physical Fitness Test Standards. The requirements differ depending on age and gender, but you can take a look at this page to figure out what to expect for your particular situation. The test itself is just a 2 mile a run, a max set of pushups, and a max set of situps, and training for it should be pretty straightforward. Once you’re in, basic training involves more varied fitness, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

Here’s what I’d do:

Do a couple runs each week, mixing it up between “race-pace” (around 2+ miles) runs and higher-intensity intervals (alternating 400 meters and 800 meters every week; start with however many you can comfortably do at an intensity level of 7-8 on a scale of 10 with a couple minutes walking to recover; add one additional interval each week).

Go for “intense” walks or hikes a couple times a week, preferably with a heavy pack. Fill a hiking backpack with books or even rocks wrapped in towels. This will get you used to marching with your gear. Keep the pace up and try to maintain your normal stride length. Do about an hour, and try to improve the distance you’re able to cover over time.

Get a pullup bar in your house or office, and do pullups, pushups, and situps every time you get an opportunity. Going to the kitchen to grab a bite? Do a quick set of pullups. Commercial break? Drop down and do some pushups or situps. The key with these movements is to accumulate volume without ever going to failure. Get used to the movement – “grease the groove,” as many wise men have said – and do it as often as you can without straining or pushing too hard. If your max is 10 pullups in a row, do five crisp, easy reps every time you pass the pullup bar.

One day a week, test yourself. Do a 2 mile run, max pushups, and max situps. Make sure you’re hitting (and better yet, surpassing) the requirements.

Honestly, while Primal eating would certainly help your training, I’m not sure you should get too used to good, clean, Primal food. Once you’re in basic, you eat what they provide. It may make sense to loosen up a bit on the diet, just so your body isn’t shocked by a sudden and sustained dose of less-than-ideal food. Can any service members with experience in basic training for the National Guard help us out here?

Good luck with the National Guard!

To bulk up I increased my carb intake with sweet potatoes, pasture-raised/organic whole milk, white potatoes, and fruit. It has worked well, my lifts have increased as well as my lean mass. The only problem is that the carbs make me tired and lazy. How can I keep the energy I have with low-carb while bulking?

Thanks,

Mark

Great name.

That’s the thing with carbs (even Primal ones like those you mentioned, in sufficient amounts) – they really make you dependent on them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it suits your goals, but the constant see-sawing of energy levels can really be annoying. When I was pounding multiple hundreds of grams of carbs a day to support my training, I had to constantly eat, or else I’d crash. Sound familiar?

I haven’t thought about bulking for years, but if I were going to bulk using carbs, I’d probably take a cyclical approach to my carb intake. On workout days, I’d eat higher carb and lower fat, preferably getting most of my carbs after the workout. On rest days, I’d eat high fat and low carb. Protein would remain high throughout. This way, you’re not pounding the carbs all day, every day, instead keeping them mostly post-workout, when your muscles are highly insulin sensitive.

Another option is to do a periodic carb refeed. Basically, a carb refeed is a big whack of carbs taken in the space of a half a day to a day. It’s a way to replenish glycogen stores and up-regulate leptin levels (if you’ve been hypocaloric). Used correctly, this can actually jumpstart your metabolism and allow you to train fairly hard while mostly sticking to a lower-carb approach for the rest of your week. When you do a refeed, you want to keep fat low for that day. Try one or two refeeds a week.

Ultimately, a bulk comes down to getting enough calories, particularly protein, and providing enough stimulus to your body. Eating some carbs tends to stimulate the appetite, thereby making it easier to get hypercaloric. Low carb tends to reduce appetite and increase satiety, thereby making it more of a struggle to get hypercaloric. That’s why low carb is so effective for weight loss, but it’s also why low carb isn’t as easy for bulking. The two methods I outlined – cyclic low-carb and carb refeeds – should help you bulk without making you feel lazy and tired.

Dear Mark,

Training for strength versus training for hypertrophy — does one have to come at the expense of the other?

Ever since adopting the ancestral health lifestyle in September of 2010, I’ve made substantial strength gains and put on a good 20 pounds of lean muscle mass — from 5-foot-10, 155 pounds to 175 pounds.

My delts, upper back and chest have responded favorably to the compound movements I’ve adopted into my training routine — bench press, overhead press, deadlift, weighted pull-ups, weighted dips. In other words, none of that sissy isolation stuff that seemingly every gym-goer performs religiously. I’m a fan of the Stronglifts 5X5 protocol. That is, five sets of five reps with the heaviest load I can lift.

The squat rack at my local (insert big-name gym franchise here) is hardly ever used. Very rarely does anyone attempt to bench press more than 185 pounds. The bros tend to congregate around the EZ Bar rack, performing triceps extensions and bicep curls to their hearts’ content.

What troubles me is that while I’m pound-for-pound stronger than any other gym-goer I’ve encountered, most of the regulars are, to put it one way, far more jacked. Their arms are flat-out bigger. Yet they throw around a lot less weight, preferring higher reps and a lighter load.

These observations seem to run counter to your suggestions, which I’ve based my training philosophy on. Could there be some truth to the widely-held Broscience notions that favor volume lifting for muscle-building? Does that even make sense from an evolutionary perspective? Or am I just doing something wrong?

Thanks!

Max

There actually is some truth to the “broscience.” A 2007 meta-analysis of the available literature found that lifting 60%-85% of your 1RM max for reps is probably the most effective way to stimulate hypertrophy. Reps-wise, that translates to about 6-12 reps per set. Since you’re currently doing 5 sets of 5, try reducing the weight and increasing the reps to between 6-8, which is a nice sweet spot for strength and size. To focus more on size, move the reps up to between 8-10. You may not even have to drop the weight as much as someone coming from a 3×5 program, because 5×5 has prepared you for a good amount of volume.

Another option is to vary your reps and sets over the week. Do a heavy day of lower reps one day, maybe sets of three, then do a day of high reps, maybe sets of eight or ten. Play around with it to find what works.

It sounds like you’re mainly concerned with the size of your arms. 5’10 and 175 is pretty solid, but heavy squats and deadlifts can famously steer weight toward the lower body while leaving the upper body somewhat T-rex-esque. Am I right? Don’t worry, and just throw in some barbell curls, weighted pullups/chinups, lying tricep extensions, and weighted dips once or twice a week. Most of these are compound exercises, so you won’t be giving up Primal cred. You may not even have to vary your rep scheme if you relent and throw in some arm-centric stuff.

The good news is that you’ve built an excellent base of strength, a foundation upon which you can begin adding volume and hypertrophy-centric training. By starting with strength and then worrying about hypertrophy, you’re doing things the right way, and I’d bet a large sum of money that, in a year’s time, you’ll be in a better spot – strengthwise and sizewise – than the guys at the gym who neglect the compound lifts.

As mentioned in the previous answer, hypertrophy also comes down to diet. What I find is that lifting heavy for moderate reps puts a person at their baseline hypertrophy. To put on more muscle than you already have lifting heavy, you’re going to have to eat a lot. Protein is important, of course, and fat provides energy, fat-soluble vitamins, and hormonal precursors for important anabolics, but you’ll probably need to incorporate some carbs. The carbs will allow you to get more calories in, and they’ll support a shift toward higher reps and more volume by replenishing glycogen.

I think it makes sense, evolutionarily. If you look at photos of hunter-gatherers (perhaps our likeliest Grok analogues), they can be lean, “cut,” and strong, but not bodybuilder big. Strong arms are useful, but eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns. Would having bigger arms really help this guy do what he needs to do – bag game, support his family, gather food? Walking around with a perma-pump and 18-inch biceps simply doesn’t make sense in his situation.

Whatever you do, don’t limit yourself based on ideology. If you want big muscles, get big muscles. Just realize that you may have hit your “limit,” and you’ll probably have to adopt some evolutionarily “novel” strategies, like stuffing yourself with food and lifting heavy things over and over again for more reps than you otherwise would.

Grab a Copy of The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation and Start Getting Primal Today!

Weekend Link Love

There’s a battle brewing over flip-flops. While Bob Thompson (of the Institute for Preventive Foot Health) makes a mistake when he criticizes the lack of “heel support and structural support… on that little slab of rubber,” he makes a good point that “taking your five toes and grabbing your shoe” is not normal and could lead to problems. Where do you stand?

What’s better than flip-flops?  Zero-drop huaraches for your kids.

Neanderthals used medicinal plants (surely with a prescription only), new fossil evidence indicates.

Speaking of Neanderthals, they sported massively muscled right arms because of their propensity to… scrape bits of flesh off of animal hide to make pretty clothes?

I had a chat with Max and Josh, co-creators of Caveman College, about maintaining a Primal life in college. If you’re a college student trying to make this lifestyle work, you’ll love their blog.

Physical inactivity is deadly. Get up and go for a walk after you read this (and take someone with you).

Arnold blogs. Do you have the Spark?

Lucky cows, huh? I guess red wine really does pair well with red meat.

Recipe Corner

Beef rendang, because Indonesian food is woefully underrated and tough to find, so why not make your own?
Since good strawberries are easier to find than truly good tomatoes, try this recipe for strawberry salsa.

Time Capsule

One year ago (July 22 – July 28)

How to Prepare for Barefooting – Going barefoot isn’t as simple as just going barefoot. Here’s how to prepare for it.
7 Home Remedies to Relieve a Sunburn – If you’ve already been burned, this is how to make it better.

Comment of the Week

I’m addicted to spinach. Did funny things to my arm though…:P

- You and the Neanderthals both, Nionvox.

Grab The Primal Blueprint Cookbook Today and Receive Free S&H and a Free Primal Blueprint Poster

Slow-Cooked Coconut Ginger Pork

Using a slow cooker is one of the easiest ways to get a hearty, healthy meal on the table with very little effort. If it’s a hot summer day and you want to cook a big meal without turning on the oven, a slow cooker is the answer. If the weather is frigid and you’re craving comfort food, pull out the slow cooker. If you’re busy as all get-out and cooking is the last thing you want to do, the solution is – you guessed it – a slow cooker.

Slow-Cooked Coconut Ginger Pork is a recipe that both slow cooker aficionados and newbies will love. A large cut of pork is slow cooked until tender and infused with the spicy, aromatic flavor of ginger, garlic and coconut milk. Salty, savory pork fat drips off the roast as it cooks, swirling with the ginger-scented coconut milk to create an incredibly flavorful broth. When coconut milk cooks for hours it loses its milky quality and looks more like coconut oil. Still, it adds a creamy richness to the broth and seeps into the meat, giving it a slightly sweet flavor.

Unless you’re feeding a large group, meals from a slow cooker typically provide leftovers for days. On the first night, serve the succulent pork and rich broth in bowls filled with raw shredded cabbage or steamed cauliflower rice. The next day, shred the meat over a salad. After that, add the meat to a stir-fry or omelet or eat it cold straight out of the refrigerator. Anyway you serve it, you’re going to love it.

Servings: 6-8

Ingredients:

3 to 4 pound boneless pork butt/shoulder roast
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 onion, peeled and cut into 8 chunks
1/2 can of coconut milk
Lime wedges for garnish

Instructions:

Mix together the coriander, cumin, salt and pepper. Use your fingers to rub the seasonings all over the roast.

Place the meat in a slow cooker and surround with onions, garlic, ginger and the half can of coconut milk.

The roast will give off moisture and fat while cooking, doubling or tripling the amount of broth by the time the roast is ready.

Cover the slow cooker and cook on high for 5 to 6 hours or on low for 8 to 10 hours. Although both cooking temperatures give delicious results, meat cooked on low will be the most tender.

Get the Primal Blueprint Fitness eBook, Free Health Tips and Primal Recipes Delivered to Your Inbox

Primal vs. The Pyramid – My 20 Year Weight Loss and Body Transformation Story

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

A few years ago, after watching my weight slowly creep up (along with my age and my blood pressure) I decided it was time to do something. Something different. I had struggled with weight issues since the age of 10 or so, and outside of a serious bout of anorexia nervosa, had been slightly overweight for years. It was one thing to be slightly overweight and self conscious; however, now it was affecting my health, and it was clear that it would only get worse over time. Since I have a Master’s degree in Nutrition, I knew what conventional advice would offer me. I also knew it didn’t work. How many times had I done the numbers in the last 20 years?

Let’s see….

Ideal weight = x

Desired weight loss = current weight – x

(Create a calorie deficit of y + exercise like a maniac) * z weeks = Perfect Body

Usually for me, this worked out to needing about 1200-1500 calories a day and 5-6 hours of cardio a week, which should have gotten me to my goal within z weeks, no problem. This, of course, was 1200 calories carefully metered out into the following conventional recommendations:

60% carbohydrate, 20% fat, 20% protein.

After all, we all know that high fat and/or high protein diets are dangerous. Right?

And so, armed with my magic numbers, I would set out on my journey, with excellent resolve and motivation. And yet…week after week after week, no change. What I DID feel was hungry a lot of the time, grumpy, deprived, and finally frustrated to the point of saying, well, there is no point. I have enough education in nutrition and powerful tracking tools to know that I was actually eating 1200 calories. I would persist, and try again, and never, never a change.

After over 20 years of self-experimentation, it was so clear that everything I had learned about planning a healthy diet was not effective for weight loss for me. I was getting all the vitamins and minerals and fiber I needed according to the RDAs, but I was not truly healthy. I was overweight – not obese, but overweight. And my belly was big. Things were not as they should be. I thought maybe this is just “how my body is” and I need to accept it. But I still didn’t believe this to be true.

I started doing some internet research on alternatives, and ended up reading a few articles which talked about high fat diets as effective for weight loss and muscle development. Despite this, when I first started reading about eating MORE fat and exercising LESS, I was skeptical. In fact, I stopped my research, dismissed it as a fad, and kept up my high carb, high cardio ways. (I’m slow to accept change…) Finally, one day, I decided to give a different way of eating a 2-week trial. I was terrified I would end up gaining weight, but the following quote had caught my attention:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Now, I’m not insane, so surely I wouldn’t keep up this dietary nonsense and expect to lose weight, right? And I started to try something different.

I continued with the low-fat, higher carb diet, but I changed my exercise habits to include a new form of exercise, bodyweight exercises, twice a week, in place of cardio. These exercises kicked my butt. I worked out a simple routine of 7-8 exercises that I could do in our small apartment, with no equipment, in 20-30 minutes. It took me weeks to work up to a reasonable set of repetitions, and I felt it in every muscle in my body. I didn’t lose weight (I had not changed my diet yet) but I DID start to notice my clothes were fitting more loosely. However, my blood pressure and my weight remained elevated.

I then read a book called Syndrome W by Dr. Harriet Mogul. She is an endocrinologist who works with women who have trouble losing weight and are developing related health problems. She has a treatment plan for her patients that seems to be very effective, and one part of this is eating a “modified low carb” diet, meaning that you don’t eat much carbohydrate before 4 pm, at which point you can have a few modest servings. I gave up my toast at breakfast and my sandwich bread at lunch, and that was the point where the magic began. I started to (skeptically) try letting myself have a little more fat – an egg every day at breakfast, a little cheese to replace the toast, a handful of nuts mid morning, plenty of olive oil on my salad, whole fat yogurt instead of low fat, and, to my amazement, the weight started to come right off.

During this time, I had also read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and was getting more interested/concerned regarding the American food supply. We were living overseas at the time, but this book made me consider what I ate and where it came from as important parts of health and nutrition. Then, in further internet searching, I happened upon Mark’s Daily Apple, the fantastic blog of Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint and I began my education on the Primal way of life. At first I thought it sounded a bit extreme…no grains or legumes? Really? Aren’t those superfoods? That’s what I’d heard my whole life…oh yeah. Maybe it was wrong. With my background in nutritional sciences, I started to delve into the science behind these different dietary theories, and the evidence continued stacking up that, for most humans, this is a superior way to eat. I remain opposed to dietary dogma in any form, and believe there is always an exception to a rule, so I am flexible, but I do believe there are some basic principles that are good and safe for anyone to follow.

Despite understanding some of the science behind the grain/legume/gluten issues, it took me the better part of a year to develop the nerve to give up grains, in particular gluten. And I have never felt better, and will never go back. In total, over 2 1/2 years, I have lost 30-35 pounds, with a BMI around 21. My blood pressure is completely normal. On last check a month ago, my triglycerides were 42, my HDL and LDL were both in the 70s, and my HbA1c was at 5. These numbers are all improved dramatically from my last tests, done 5 years ago on my usual low fat, high fiber, high carbohydrate diet. I have never felt better or more fit than I do now. I eat delicious, whole foods, feel good about how I’m feeding my family, and desire to share some of this experience with anyone who will read. I also hope to start working as a nutritionist, finally using that Master’s degree, but with a Primal-inspired twist. Thanks, Mark!!

Emily

Grab a Copy of The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation and Start Getting Primal Today!

Ancient Wisdom Confirmed by Modern Science

This is a guest post from Jonathan Bailor of The Smarter Science of Slim and JonathanBailor.com.

Executive Summary

Short Version: Primal has been proven right.

Longer Version: Endorsed by the world-wide scientific community including top doctors at the Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA, and approved as curriculum for registered dieticians (RDs) by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the single largest meta-analysis of health and fitness ever conducted shows that conventional “eat less, exercise more” approaches are far less effective than going Primal, harm our health, and lead to fat gain 95.4 percent of the time.

I Had to Stop Doing The Same Thing Over and Over and Expecting Different Results

Much like Mark, my journey into the science of wellness started because I was fed-up with the counterproductive nature of conventional wisdom. Over a decade ago I worked as a personal trainer and spent my days helping people eat less and exercise more. It didn’t take long for me to see the now proven fact that this conventional wisdom fails long-term over 95% of the time. Sure, as long as my clients paid me to “force” them to starve themselves and exercise obsessively, they’d lose weight. Then life would happen and 19 out of 20 of them would gain it all back and then some. Worse off than before they trained with me, they were disappointed and I was frustrated. Everything I was taught as a trainer said that I was doing the right thing. But how could this conventional wisdom be right if it was failing 19 out of 20 times?

General Rule: If something fails more than 95% of the time, it’s not right.

Determined to help rather than hurt my clients, I decided to leave my job as a personal trainer and spend my time researching a sustainable approach to health and fitness.

Geeking My Way To Grok

Having exhausted conventional wisdom, I turned to the only resource I had left: Raw science. Not what magazines published. Not what the news reported. Just dense, dry, and difficult to acquire academic studies from all around the world. If an academic researcher didn’t write it in a peer-reviewed journal or in an email to me or explain it to me over the phone, I wasn’t interested in it. I wanted to know what the actual experts—aka scientists/researchers…people who spend their lives in labs vs. on television—had proven about long-term fat-loss and health.

Ten years of collaboration with top medical researchers around the world, over 1,100 studies, and more than 10,000 pages of scientific research later, I realized—to my surprise and delight—that the proven key to practical and permanent wellness is to eat more and exercise less—but smarter. I then picked up a copy of The Primal Blueprint and realized that a gentleman named Mark Sisson had also discovered this smarter science…and here we are today.

More and Mainstream Support for You

In my experience, those who go Primal know it’s right since the results speak for themselves. What I hope to do here and in future posts is to reinforce your resolve with massive collection of science previously unavailable to the public. As an added bonus, we’ve been fortunate enough to receive endorsements from world-wide scientific community including top doctors at the Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA, and have been approved as curriculum for registered dieticians (RDs) by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, so let’s just say that you’ll be quite equipped to assist those who haven’t yet seen the science.

Let’s get started.

The Best of the Ancient World Confirmed by the Best of Modern Science

Mark and I may use different words, but our about eating and exercise findings are essentially the same. Here’s a quick overview. I’ll dig more into the science in future posts.

Reprogramming Our Genes

Mark speaks to the body’s wisdom and desire to keep us healthy automatically. We didn’t evolve to be heavy and sick. My research confirms this by digging into the endocrine and neurological signals of the metabolic regulatory system that control how much we eat, how many calories we burn, and how much body fat we store. It also shows that when we “eat poisonous things,” this system gets clogged up and begins to regulate us around a higher set-point weight. Thus, long-term fat loss has nothing to do with counting calories and everything to do with restoring our body’s natural ability to regulate our weight appropriately.

Consider a study done at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Researchers examined both heavy and thin people to see how their metabolism behaved when they were given no calories. As expected, everyone’s system slowed down and everyone burned body fat, but here’s the kicker: Thin people burned off nearly 50% more body fat than heavy people.

Think about that for a second. Despite having more body fat, the heavy people burned less body fat. In the words of the researchers, “Obese patients could not take advantage of their most abundant fat fuel sources but have to depend on the efficient use of…the breakdown products of body protein [muscle].”

Where Patients’ Metabolisms Got Energy

The heavy people needed to burn body fat, but did not burn body fat effectively. This is just one of many clinical examples of losing our natural ability to regulate weight appropriately. The researchers put the problem like this: “Profound metabolic disturbances exist in the obese state that constantly interfere with normal hormonal responses [the ability to burn body fat].”

We don’t have to manually regulate breaths in and breaths out, nor do we have to manually regulate calories in and calories out, as long as we adhere to the ancient wisdom of our ancestors and modern wisdom of the most rigorous metabolic research available: Eat more—but higher quality food and do less—but higher quality exercise.

[The simplistic notion] that weight can be controlled by ‘deciding’ to eat less and exercise more…is at odds with substantial scientific evidence illuminating a precise and powerful biologic system that maintains body weight within a relatively narrow range.

– Dr. J.M. Friedman, Rockefeller University

Millions of naturally thin people and millions of years of evolution demonstrate that our body can keep us thin automatically. The key question is how can we “reprogram our genes” to make our bodies work more like the bodies of naturally thin people? There’s a lot of science showing us exactly how to do this. We just haven’t had access to it…until now.

Eat More High-Quality Food

Mark has soundly debunked the myth that “a calorie is a calorie,” and shows that food quality matters immensely. There’s no shortage of studies supporting this. The academic research community has long proven that the quality of a calorie depends on four factors:

Satiety
Aggression
Nutrition
Efficiency

Satiety is how quickly calories fill us up. Aggression is how likely calories are to be stored as body fat. Nutrition is how many vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids, etc., calories provide. Efficiency is how easily calories are converted into body fat. SANE—or high quality, fat burning, and health promoting foods—are rich in water, fiber, and protein and are the basis of a Primal lifestyle: non-starchy vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, berries, citrus, nuts, seeds, etc.

More good news: Study after study confirm that we can achieve what Mark calls “effortless weight loss” by eating more of these SANE Primal foods. For example, in all of the studies that follow, everyone ate the exact same quantity of calories, but one group’s calories were of much higher quality (aka more Primal, more SANE):

University of Florida researcher J.W. Krieger analyzed 87 studies and found that those people who ate SANE calories lost an average of 12 more pounds of body fat compared to those who ate an equal quantity of lower quality calories.
C.M. Young at Cornell University split people into three groups, each eating 1,800 calories per day, but at different levels of quality. The highest-quality group lost 86.5% more body fat than the lowest-quality group.
In the Annals of Internal Medicine, F.L. Benoît compared a reduced-calorie low-quality diet to a reduced-calorie high-quality diet. After ten days the high-quality diet burned twice as much body fat.
Additional studies by researchers U. Rabast (1978,1981), P. Greene (2003), N.H. Baba (1999), A. Golay (1996), M.E. Lean (1997), C.M. Young (1971), and D.K. Layman (2003) all show that people who ate higher-quality calories lost an average of 22% more weight than those who ate the exact same quantity of lower-quality calories.

Heal Your Hormones

We all know about the importance of hormones when it comes to long-term wellness. We’re not alone. The most brilliant minds in the research community have proven that the sooner we heal our hormones, the sooner our body will do what it’s designed to do: keep us healthy and fit. Dr. P.J. Havel from the University of California presents the scientific explanation of how hormones handle our love handles:

Short-term signals are primarily from the GI tract (e.g., CCK and GI stretch receptors) and are involved in promoting sensations of satiety that lead to meal termination. These short-term signals by themselves are not sufficient to regulate energy balance and body adiposity. The long-term signals insulin and leptin are produced and circulate in proportion to recent energy intake and body adiposity. Together, the short- and long-term signals interact to regulate energy balance in that insulin and leptin appear to determine the sensitivity of the brain to the satiety-producing effects of the short-term signals from the GI tract.

In other words, our digestive system, muscle tissue, and fat tissue are constantly communicating with our nervous system and brain via hormones. As long as we do not interfere with this communication, millions of years of evolution ensure that our weight and health will take care of itself.

“Insidious fat gain,” as Mark calls it, occurs when we lose our natural ability to stay slim, that is, when our hormonal system breaks down. J. Le Magnen in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews puts it like this: “Humans that become obese gain weight because they are no longer able to lose weight.” Le Magnen’s statement is brilliant. Gaining body fat because we lost the ability to burn body fat thanks to straying from our primal blueprint and creating hormonal havoc is totally different than gaining body fat because we eat too much or exercise too little. And if we are gaining body fat because we’ve veered away from that blueprint, the solution is not to eat less or exercise more. It’s to move back in line with our ancestry by eating more and exercising less—but smarter.

Lift Heavy Things

These three primal words summarize thousands of pages of exercise physiology research. The science is clear: When it comes to ­long-term fat loss and health, we do not need to exercise more. We need to exercise smarter. We need to increase the quality/intensity of our exercise, not the quantity of our exercise. In fact, the higher the quality of our exercise, the less of it we can do. But more on that and resistance training in a later post. For now let’s focus on high-quality brief cardiovascular exercise…aka “sprinting once in a while.”

University of Virginia researcher B.A. Irving took two groups of women and had them do conventional low-quality cardiovascular exercise or high-quality brief cardiovascular exercise. The two groups burned the same number of calories exercising, but the high-quality brief cardiovascular exercise group spent significantly less time exercising while losing significantly more belly fat.

McMaster University researcher M. Gibala separated people into high quality brief cardiovascular exercise and traditional cardiovascular exercise groups. Over the course of the two-week study, the brief cardiovascular group exercised for two-and-a-half hours while the traditional cardiovascular exercise group exercised for ten-and-a-half hours. At the end of the study both groups got the same results even though the high-quality brief cardiovascular exercise group spent 320% less time exercising than the traditional cardiovascular exercise group. The researcher put it like this: “We thought there would be benefits, but we did not expect them to be this obvious. It shows how effective short intense exercise can be.”

Many more studies show the same encouraging results and further prove that hours of conventional exercise per week are not needed. Consider this small sample:

“Vigorous activities are associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease, whereas moderate or light activities have no clear association with the risk of coronary heart disease,” says H.D. Sesso at Harvard University.
“The intensity of effort was more important than the quantity of energy output in deterring hypertension and preventing premature mortality,” found R.S. Paffenbarger Jr. of Stanford University.
“There is an inverse association between relative intensity of physical activity and risk of coronary heart disease,” states I.M. Lee, also at Harvard University.
“Vigorous-intensity activities may have greater benefit for reducing cardiovascular disease and premature mortality than moderate-intensity physical activities,” noted the American Heart Association.
“Exercise training reduces the impact of the metabolic syndrome and that the magnitude of the effect depends on exercise intensity,” discovered P.M. Haram of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Even day-to-day cardiovascular benefits like not being out of breath after walking up a few flights of stairs are achieved faster with high-quality exercise. Edward Coyle’s research at the University of Texas found: “Interval training in untrained people can markedly increase aerobic endurance…. This serves as a dramatic reminder of the potency of exercise intensity…. Interval training is very time efficient with much ‘bang for the buck.’” Old Dominion University researcher D.P. Swain adds: “Vigorous intensity exercise has been shown to increase aerobic fitness more effectively than moderate intensity exercise, suggesting that the former may confer greater cardioprotective benefits.”

Living Better Through Primal Thinking and Smarter Science

There’s a famous quote along the lines of dissatisfaction is the mother of innovation. Mark’s dissatisfaction led to The Primal Blueprint. My dissatisfaction led to The Smarter Science of Slim. Take our collective dissatisfaction with convention and add in Primal wisdom, modern science, the support of the world-wide scientific community, and a growing percentage of the mainstream dietetic community, and we should all be proud to be part of a movement that will leave a legacy as vital as the ancestral legacy we’re living.

Genes provide the blueprint, modern science confirms it, and now we get to live a life that will keep us healthy and slim practically and permanently. As we “honor our genes,” we can smile even bigger and let our eyes shine even brighter knowing that we have the single largest meta-analysis of wellness ever conducted supporting us, and that the mainstream will be along shortly.

Jonathan Bailor

The Smarter Science of Slim

Trailer: Jonathan Bailor’s Smarter Science of Slim (VIDEO)

Is Wheat Addictive?

Within the Primal/paleo community and elsewhere, it’s often stated offhandedly that wheat is addictive. And absolutely, wheat for many people feels like something they could never give up. I hear it all the time: “I couldn’t live without bread.” “What would I do without cereal, dinner rolls, toast, {insert your favorite grain-based food item here}.” And wheat is often the main culprit in the sugar/insulin rollercoaster that drives sugar-burners’ need to eat (more wheat) every few waking hours. But is wheat addictive in a different sense – as an opiate like heroin and other drugs? Today I take a look at the research and attempt to separate fact from fiction. What do we really know about wheat as an opiate? Let’s find out…

Humans and other animals have something called an opioidergic system – an evolutionarily-preserved way for an organism to modulate behavior, addiction, and reward. When you exercise, for example, a lot of the euphoria you feel comes from endogenous (produced in-house) opioids interacting with your opiate receptors. This is the body’s way of dealing with a stressful experience (physical exertion), reducing pain, and it also has the effect of reinforcing a behavior that is positive, healthy, and in the organism’s best interest. The opioidergic system also interacts with the immune, endocrine, and central nervous systems (in other words, this is physiology, so it’s all interrelated), but we won’t get too much into that today. Now, it’s not just endogenous opioids interacting with our receptors; certain substances, like heroin and other opiate drugs, act as exogenous (produced out-of-house) opioids, thereby hijacking and “supercharging” our physiology. Cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco also interact with opioid receptors. The addictiveness of these substances is infamous, so these interactions exist shouldn’t surprise you.

However, there are other exogenous opioid peptides, also known as exorphins (exogenous morphine), found in substances that we don’t normally consider to be repositories of potentially addictive morphine-analogs. Like wheat.

Some of the most extensively studied food-based exorphins – gluten exorphins, from gluten, and gliadorphins, from gliadin – are derived from wheat. In a previous post, I raised the possibility of a wheat addiction. But are these exorphins actually problematic? Do they really interact with your opioid receptors to make you crave another “hit”? Well, an early 1979 paper (PDF) on the topic suggests that in order for them to actually function as in vivo opioid exorphins in our bodies, wheat exorphins must appear in our gastrointestinal tract after ingestion and during digestion, they have to survive degradation by intestinal enzymes into constituent amino acids, they have to be absorbed – intact – into the bloodstream, and they must pass the blood-brain barrier.

Do they satisfy those requirements? Let’s take a look.

When wheat is applied to conditions designed to simulate the human gut (complete with physiological amounts and proportions of stomach acid and digestive enzymes), exorphins are produced. This suggests that applying wheat to actual human stomachs (by eating it) should also produce wheat exorphins. Satisfied.

There’s also evidence that gluten exorphins do show up in the bloodstream after ingestion of wheat, at least in subjects with celiac disease (PDF). But let’s temper our conclusions; remember that celiac disease is usually characterized by a severely-compromised intestinal lining, and that the subjects who had exorphins in their blood tended to have the most intestinal damage. It remains to be seen if wheat has the same effect on people with healthy, intact intestinal linings. Satisfied and satisfied.

I was unable to find hard evidence of wheat opioids crossing the blood-brain barrier. There is this rat study, which found that gluten exorphins stimulate the secretion of prolactin (an excess of which can lead to loss of libido in both sexes) by interacting with opioid receptors located outside of the blood-brain barrier, but not inside it. On the other hand, Dr. Emily Deans says that exorphins “definitely end up in the body and brain of rats fed gluten orally.” She also uses low-dose naltrexone (an opiate blocker) to treat celiac patients who can’t seem to give up wheat, which would suggest that something’s getting through to interact with those receptors. Still, not completely satisfied.

We’ve all had people tell us “but I could never give up bread!” In my experience, and from talking to hundreds upon hundreds of newcomers and sharing emails with many more, this is common in folks going Primal. Your pastas, your breads, your pizzas, your pastries, your muffins, your cookies are the foods that people have trouble giving up and the foods that, once expunged from the diet, have the greatest tendency to cause “relapses” if eaten again. Part of it is cultural conditioning, I’m sure – the whole “staff of life” thing, the inundation from birth with the message that whole grains represent the pinnacle of healthy eating, the bread basket at dinner, the pancakes on Saturday morning, the birthday cake that you’re practically excommunicated for refusing – and part of it is the fact that wheat flour goes well with vegetable fat, refined sugar, and low prices, but I wouldn’t be surprised if wheat has addictive properties mediated through its unique exorphins.

We just can’t say that yet, not definitively. It may be addictive, but not to everyone. If your gut is permeable enough to allow passage of opioid peptides into your blood, I could see it causing problems. If your gut is healthy and intact, maybe it’s not such an issue. More research is clearly required. Still, until this all gets sorted out, I’d suggest people continue to avoid wheat and other gluten-containing grains (and heck, all grains for that matter). And if you’re going to mention the opioid stuff to any skeptics or interested parties, don’t sound too authoritative. Admit that while evidence for wheat’s addictiveness exists, it’s far from conclusive.

Besides, wheat’s not the only food whose proteins are degraded into opioid peptides ():

Casein, a dairy protein, can also be cleaved to form exorphins. Human milk even contains a number of dairy exorphins, most notably beta-casomorphin (casein morphine). In fact, beta-casomorphin levels are highest in colostrum, the highly nutritious “first milk” that infants get from their mothers. Perhaps that’s a way to get babies hooked on the sweet, nutritious, essential breastmilk right off the bat? The old “bait and switch,” where you slip the customer the pure stuff, get them hooked on it, and subsequently sell them the stuff that’s been cut with filler? We don’t know for sure, but I would assume that the most nutritious, perfectly “designed” food for human infants contains opioid peptides for a very important reason.

Hemorphins, a class of opioid peptides, come from hemoglobin, a protein found in the red blood cells of vertebrates. If you like your steak bloody rare, you’re likely consuming hemoglobin, and your stomach is probably cleaving the hemoglobin up into hemorphins. Of course, since hemorphins already appear naturally in your cerebrospinal fluid, brain, and plasma, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about becoming addicted to blood sausage.

Other food compounds can act as exorphins, too. Flavonoids, those bioactive plant compounds with antioxidant properties, may interact with opioid receptors. Epicatechin, a flavonoid found in green tea and chocolate, can act like an exorphin, at least in mice. Its cardioprotective effects are even thought to be mediated through its opioid activity.

Interestingly, even spinach contains an exorphin which, along with a gluten exorphin variant, has actually been shown to improve the learning ability of rodents.

That doesn’t mean you should pound spinach and wheat gluten before finals week and hope for a miracle. It also doesn’t mean that you should avoid chocolate and give your baby formula instead of breastmilk because you’re worried about addiction. It simply means that the effects of food exorphins aren’t clear-cut. They aren’t necessarily “bad.”

I’m definitely anti-wheat. I think people eat way too much of it, and it appears to perpetuate its own consumption. I wish I could say definitively whether wheat is addictive as an opiate or not – but I can’t. Not yet.

What say you, folks? Were you addicted to wheat? Are you? What about any of the other foods that break down into opioid exorphins – any spinach addicts out there?

Thanks for reading.

Grab a Copy of The Primal Blueprint: Updated and Expanded Paperback Edition and Start Getting Primal Today!

Is It Primal? – Paleo Bread, Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, Psyllium Fiber, and Other Foods Scrutinized

I love doing these “Is It Primal?” posts. For one, the supply of topics is virtually limitless, because you guys are constantly sending in new foods and products for me to research. Two, I’m learning a ton of new stuff. And it’s not just specific foods I’m learning about; it’s also forcing me to think about health and what Primal actually means in new ways. There are plenty of times where I approach a particular entry with the assumption that it’s definitely going to be Primal, or definitely not going to be Primal, only to be surprised by what a little more research shows. It can be disconcerting to have your beliefs challenged or even scrambled, but so be it. That’s a small price to pay, right?

Let’s get to the foods. We’re doing five today – Paleo Bread, Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, psyllium fiber, expeller pressed refined coconut oil, and unflavored gelatin.

Paleo Bread

Paleo Bread is actually a specific product. Now, I haven’t tried it myself, and while I’m generally against using paleo or Primal approximations of neolithic foods as staples, Paleo Bread looks like an extremely solid, ideal choice. Here’s why:

Choice of either coconut or almond meal-based bread. Coconut is the Primal darling, but not everyone likes or is compatible with it. Same goes for almonds. Giving folks a choice means pretty much everyone can find something they enjoy and tolerate.
The almonds used are blanched, with the skins removed. Since one of the major problems with eating a lot of nuts (like in breads made from them) is the mineral-binding phytate content, and phytate lies in the skin of the almonds, Paleo Bread should be safe on that front.
It’s made from actual food, with a short list. Almond/coconut flour, egg whites, psyllium (more on that below), apple cider vinegar, baking soda, and water are the ingredients. There’s nothing particularly offensive or hard-to-pronounce (which isn’t definitive, but a rather useful guideline for a food’s healthfulness) there.

If you have a hankering for bread, I’d say go for it. Just don’t make it a daily thing.

Verdict: Primal.

Bragg’s Liquid Aminos

A “soy sauce alternative,” Bragg’s Liquid Aminos still contains soy as the primary ingredient. What sets it apart, though, is the production process, the lack of wheat, and the lack of added salt. So it’s a sauce made from soy, but it’s not a soy sauce.

Bragg’s isn’t fermented, unlike most soy sauces. Instead of fermentation, the folks at Bragg’s apply hydrochloric acid (the same stuff found in your stomach) to soybeans, “predigesting” them and releasing free amino acids (like glutamate). To counter the acidity, they add sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), which combines with the “chloric” part of hydrochloric acid to make the salty taste. I’m actually a tentative fan of fermented soy as a condiment (miso, natto, that sort of thing), because it seems to have different effects on humans than processed or unfermented soy. I outlined some of the apparent benefits in this older post, if you’re interested.

I’ve heard of MSG-sensitive and soy-sensitive people having issues with the free glutamate in Bragg’s Liquid Aminos. I’m not convinced that naturally-occurring free glutamate is a problem, but I can’t argue with people who report sensitivities.

That there’s no wheat is a good thing, but you can get wheat-free tamari sauces that taste great. Heck, even regular soy sauce (which has wheat) might be “free of wheat allergens,” owing to the fermentation. Personally, I don’t like the taste of Bragg’s. Not sure how to describe it, really.

Verdict: Not Primal (unfermented soy), but it doesn’t appear very threatening.

Psyllium Fiber

Psyllium fiber comes two different ways, with each having a different effect on your bowels and their movements. Psyllium husk, which is the popular type of pysllium fiber found in most supplements, comes from the exterior of the psyllium seed and is almost entirely insoluble fiber. It bulks up your poop and can help move things along, but it’s pretty much an inert polysaccharide. Your gut bacteria can’t do much with it, let alone your “own” digestive system. If you need to fill a toilet bowl, psyllium husk will do it.

Psyllium seed powder, however, is mostly soluble fiber. That means it’s a prebiotic, fermentable fiber that can feed and support your gut flora and spur the creation of beneficial short chain fatty acids like butyrate. In fact, psyllium seed has been shown to increase butyrate production by 42%, an effect that lasted for two months after treatment.

I’m not a fan of pounding out massive dump after massive dump just because you can. I mean, sure, you don’t want to be stopped up and unable to go when you want to, but there’s nothing inherently good or beneficial about padding your bowel stats and rending your bowel walls with insoluble fiber. Soluble, prebiotic fiber? Via the production of short chain fatty acids, that stuff can actually help reduce colonic inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, protect against obesity, serve as an energy source for the colon, and possibly even protect against colon cancer. Thus, a case for psyllium seed fiber supplementation can certainly be made.

Verdict: Cautiously Primal, so long as you’re using the seed powder. But I’d rather you get your fermentable fiber in whole food form. Psyllium husk? Not Primal.

Expeller Pressed Refined Coconut Oil

There’s that word: “refined.” Not so bad when you’re talking 16-year single barrel Scotch, monocles, The New Yorker, and finely oiled mustaches, but extremely suspicious when you’re talking edible fats. Most refined oils are processed using chemical solvents like hexane, some of which may show up in the finished product. Expeller pressed coconut oil, however, is physically processed. They literally press the coconut flesh to squeeze out the oil.

Refined coconut oil doesn’t taste like coconut, thanks to the deodorizing steam-treatment it receives. If you want that coconut flavor, go for virgin coconut oil. But if you’re doing a stir-fry, cooking up some eggs, maybe oven baking some sweet potato fries, and you don’t want everything to taste like Thai food, expeller-pressed coconut oil is a fantastic choice. It’s more resistant to high heat than virgin coconut oil, too, making it the go-to fat for those times you want to cook something on high.

The other benefits of coconut oil, like the medium chain triglyceride content, are not affected by the refining process. They remain intact and present.

Verdict: Primal.

Unflavored Gelatin

The protein powder-, squatz-, oatz-, and gainz-obsessed online lifting culture may frown upon gelatin as a source of protein, but it has its place in a healthy diet. Sure, gelatin, with its unanabolic amino acid profile, can’t be relied upon as a primary protein source – it’s not going to get you huge – and early attempts at protein fasts using gelatin instead of more complete proteins resulted in the most permanent weight loss method of all: death. But as an adjunct to a protein-replete diet? Gelatin is great and underappreciated.

Hard clinical evidence of its benefits are scant. Anecdotes report benefits to bone, joint, and skin health. I’ve found that a warm cup of gelatin broth just before bed gets me incredibly sleepy. Perhaps its the glycine in the gelatin, which one study found to be effective for improving sleep in humans. Another study found that dietary gelatin reduced joint pain in athletes. At any rate, it seems helpful, if not essential.

Of course, I’d rather you get your gelatin through bone broth and gelatin-rich cuts like chicken feet, oxtail, ribs, and shanks. These will offer nutrients and complete protein along with the “incomplete” gelatinous protein, and they taste incredible. But if you’re not eating those cuts, if you’re not making broth, if the only meat you eat is completely free of gristle and bone and cartilage and sinew, incorporating a little unflavored gelatin is a worthy consideration to make. Before the days of shrinkwrapped sirloins, 95% lean ground beef, and discarding over 50% of the live weight of a cow carcass as “inedible,” humans utilized the entire animal – tendons, bones, feet, hide, cartilage, head, skin, and all the rest. That’s a lot of gelatin we evolved eating, gelatin that you’re no longer eating. Think of unflavored gelatin as a replacement for that.

For optimal digestion, gelatin should be dissolved in warm water before drinking (in one study, hydrolyzed collagen, but not undissolved gelatin, improved bone health in rats). This isn’t a very interesting way to eat it, though, so you might try adding a little fruit juice or tea to the mix and refrigerating it until it gelatinizes. Then you have a fairly healthy jello.

If you’re worried about the source of the gelatin, for ethical or nutritional reasons, you can always use a grass-fed bovine gelatin, like this one.

Verdict: Primal.

That’s it for today’s list of questionable foods. I hope I didn’t break any hearts or crush any spirits. Keep on sending more foods and I’ll try to eventually get to all of them. Thanks for reading!

Grab a Copy of The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation and Start Getting Primal Today!